Monday, January 9, 2012

Saturday night we joined the parade of looky-loos touring the LA art galleries on south La Cienega Boulevard. The profusion of mind-numbing abstract art and the zombie stares of the foraging crowd reminded me of John Logan's Rothko play, RED, and a review of it written last year by the British critic/playwright Lloyd Evans:

"This play is about painting, or rather about the remnant of painting we
call ‘modern art’. Before photograpy destroyed draughtsmanship, artists
were labourers, odd-jobbers, innovators, scientists in the best sense,
philosophers with dirty hands using the materials of the universe to
enhance our understanding of it. Until the second half of the 19th
century, painting was a vague and happy alliance between technique and
meaning. No one cared at what point a piece of representative art rose
from the literal to the metaphysical. But once craftsmanship became
obsolete this started to matter a lot. It became paramount. Divine
inspiration was everything suddenly, because there was nothing else.
Every artist had to pose as a genius or face being dismissed as a
water-colourist, a weekend doodler, an easel weasel painting pretty
sunsets. Artists declared war on craftsmanship. Sadly they won. (Writers
tried it, too, but after Finnegans Wake, the worst book ever published,
they hastily and blushingly signed an armistice.) Crucial to the
artist’s new status was his strategic decision to shift the burden of
elucidation from himself to the viewer. ‘Don’t ask me what it means. I
commune with the godhead, earth-dweller, you explain it to me.’

"These two renunciations — of technique and of meaning — created art in its current phase of inscrutable frivolity."

That about sums it up. Even the simple value of beauty seems to have been forgotten. After two hours wandering, I left the galleries feeling absolutely nothing.